Friday, August 28, 2015

Stop me if
you’ve heard this one before, but while
we’re on the subject of humor, here’s another mistake that is often made in
discussions of it: failing to identify precisely which aspect of the phenomenon of humor a theory is (or is best
interpreted as) trying to explain. For
instance, this is sometimes manifest in lists of the various “theories of
humor” put forward by philosophers over the centuries.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

In a recent
article in National Review, Ian
Tuttle tells us that “standup comedy is colliding with progressivism.” He notes that comedians like Jerry Seinfeld
and Gilbert Gottfried have complained of a new political correctness they
perceive in college audiences and in comedy clubs, and he cites feminists and
others who routinely protest against allegedly “sexist,” “racist,” and/or
“homophobic” jokes told by prominent comedians like Louis C. K. In Tuttle’s view, the “pious aspirations” of left-wing
“moral busybodies” have led them to “[object] to humor that does not bolster
their ideology” and “to conflate what is funny with what is acceptable to laugh
at.”

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Lake
Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all
the children are above average.

Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion

If you printed a lot of extra money and passed it around so as to make
everyone wealthier, the end result would merely be dramatically to decrease the
buying power of money. If you make it
easier for college students to get an “A” grade in their courses, the end
result will be that “A” grades will come to be regarded as a much less reliable
indicator of a student’s true merit. If
you give prizes to everyone who participates in a competition, winning a prize
will cease to be a big deal. In general,
where X is perceived to have greater value than Y and you try to raise the
value of Y by assimilating it to X, the actual result will instead be simply to
lower the value of X to that of Y.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

At Aeon, philosopher
Elijah Millgram comments on metaphysics and the contemporary analytic philosopher’s
penchant for appealing to intuitions. Give it a read -- it‘s very short. Millgram uses an anecdote to illustrate the
point that what intuitively seems to
be an objective fact can sometimes reflect merely contingent “policies we’ve
adopted,” where “the sense of indelible rightness and wrongness comes from
having gotten so very used to those policies.”
And of course, such policies can be bad ones. Hence the dubiousness of grounding
metaphysical arguments in intuition.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.